August 2017

Our client’s executive team needed to better understand the investment and expected risk reduction return from their patent portfolio. We helped them build a financial model and direct their patent strategy using an approach where we identified and maximized patent value.

Why is patent value a better metric to use to set patent strategy? What sources of patent value can be identified for high technology companies? We review how patents are used and how they can be valued based upon their use.

The setting is familiar: a large corporate asserter uses its patents against a smaller, high-growth company with no patents. Companies like Qualcomm, IBM, Nokia, and Microsoft regularly assert their patents. This case study describes how one of our clients included patent buying into their patent strategy to successfully defended against a corporate assertion by acquiring patents in the open market.